Boukje Schweigman's world is exciting, but never deadly. Whether she makes an experiential performance in a beautiful location during a summer festival, or takes a more artful approach in the plays she makes for theatres: you only see nice people. Even in Val, her latest. In it, we see a lot of nice people falling. Falling deep, sometimes....
For a moment, the envelope seems unopenable but then Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven conjures up the redeeming paper after all. 'The winner of the 2019 Gaudeamus Award is Kelley Sheehan!' The little American almost falls off her stool in amazement. Probably not entirely by chance, the new music organisation has positioned her right in the middle of her four fellow candidates. - She herself would...
The end of the year is approaching. So the lists fly around our ears again with 'most beautiful', 'best', 'most unforgettable', 'most moving'... fill in the blanks. I think compiling top-soaps is actually a typically male thing, but I'm not that bad. Here are three CDs you wouldn't have wanted to miss this year - in no particular order. Louise Farrenc: Variations for Piano Biliana Tzinlikova,...
Wiek Hijmans (b. 1967) is tirelessly promoting the use of the electric guitar in contemporary composed music. He also likes to be influenced by jazz and rock in his own pieces. On Electric Language, his latest CD, he presents music by eight composers alongside his own Victus. Six pieces were composed especially for him. The disc appeared on the label...
Never before has the Holland Festival placed itself at the centre of society as it is today. The 2016 programme is steeped in the turbulent times in which we live. The Netherlands holds the presidency of the European Union this spring. Artistic director Ruth Mackenzie has taken this fact unflinchingly to give 'Europe' a wide place in the programming. In presenting...
The healing power of music, some firmly believe in it - in 2013, it was even the premise of the City of London Festival. Believing that music can connect people and have a healing effect on conflictual societies, festival director Ian Ritchie asked the Brodsky Quartet to commission a composition around this theme. Thus was born the by...
Just after the end of the Early Music Festival, the Gaudeamus Music Week, the Mecca of cutting-edge notes for seventy years, starts in Utrecht. Five nominated composers under thirty compete for the coveted Gaudeamus Award, previously won by now established composers such as Unsuk Chin, Yannis Kyriakides and Michel van der Aa. For the second year, the...
He is the last surviving avant-gardist, and it will not have escaped new-music lovers that he turned 90 on Thursday, 26 March. I mean, of course, Pierre Boulez, the composer and conductor who once declared Schoenberg dead and suggested that perhaps opera houses should be blown up because of their moldy programming. The same man then tirelessly broke a lance for the music of Arnold Schoenberg ...
'Pearls' is an exhibition with the limitlessness, fantasy and dreamlike vistas that come with a fairy tale. Associations with the pearl roll in all directions. Those who wander around in 'Pearls' forget for a moment everything to do with sober everyday reality. Pearls appear everywhere. The works of art accompanying this exhibition are scattered among the fixed...
Popcorn wants to build bridges and dissolve borders; away with the differences between high and low culture. Covers of the band's favourite songs are interspersed with new compositions, thus blurring boundaries. Unfortunately, they do not succeed in this and the band sounds mostly academic and soulless. Popcorn is an experimental performance in which a composite band aims to bridge the gap between...
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